So she’d spent the last two days leaving messages for him with his roommates at Columbia. She’d only just reached him that morning, but he was on his way to an early yoga class, and promised he’d call her that night.
And that was what she was thinking about when Marc chastised her for mislabeling the film.
“Cee. Cee!” He nudged her where she was sitting on the dirty floor in the corner of the seafood restaurant, packaging and labeling the rolls that had just been shot.
It was day one of five of the Carlo di Varenna campaign. After almost two and a half years, Cecilia had worked her way up to second assistant for renowned French fashion photographer Didier Moulin. Second meant she was no longer confined to sweeping up the studio in Midtown, managing invoices, and keeping his calendar. Second meant she was able to physically assist on the bigger shoots, fly to exotic locales, and handle rolls that had not yet been processed. Rolls that the ad agency, who was paying for no fewer than twenty of them to travel and stay in Mexico for a week, would likely deem “priceless.” And so the fact that she’d misnumbered three rolls in the first setup of the day was somewhat problematic.
“Why is this taking so long? I need your help putting up the silk.”
Cecilia glanced up at him. Marc, Didier’s first assistant, was in his “on location” uniform. A white V-neck tee and cargo shorts. His dirty-blond ponytail tucked up into his safari hat. Work boots. With socks. Equal parts rebel and goof, Cecilia thought. Although, in Gap overalls and Chuck Taylors, she was not one to judge. On photo shoots—for the assistants, anyway—practicality trumped fashion, every time.
“Right. Be right there.”
“Don’t fuck up those numbers,” he said, gesturing toward thephoto logbook in her hands. The lines that she’d crossed out and written over clearly evident.
“I got it.”
They had set up on the far side of the open-air restaurant where the wooden tables spilled over onto the sand. The walls were all candy colored: peppermint pink, lime green, and daisy yellow. The table mats: festive fuchsia and cobalt blue. Amber bottles of Pacífico beer and vibrant bougainvillea clippings decorated the tabletop. It was an idyllic vacation setting. The designer’s various reps were happy. All the creative and marketing people fluttering about cooing, “Guarda, com’è perfetto!!,” “È bellissimo, Didier! Dai!”
And in the center of it all, languishing around the table with faux-bronzed limbs and perfectly tousled hair, were the models. Elliot, a bookish Brit from Oxfordshire, on one side of the table. Bas, an arresting, Thor-like blond from the Netherlands. And the enigmatic newcomer, Anouk Ferrand, on the other. Jaya and Katrine, the supermodels of the bunch, weren’t arriving until later that afternoon. It was just Anouk and the boys being shot that day at the fish shack.
Cecilia had yet to officially meet them. She and Marc and the other assistants were staying at Hotel Casa Azul, a few steps below Querencia Bay, the five-star resort where they were housing the models and the other higher-ups. The fashion world could be petty that way. There was a ranking order. And in her position near the bottom, she was not likely to randomly introduce herself to those hovering near the top. Particularly to those of celebrity status. She’d learned that lesson early. That the models whose photos she had tacked to her walls in high school and college were not always warm or especially chatty with a second or third assistant. And so better to kill the fantasy herself than to have them kill it for her.
With no more than a smiling nod to those at the table, Cecilia busied herself with attaching a piece of fabric to the frame that Marc had assembled, and together they erected an eight-foot-by-eight-foot scrim to diffuse the afternoon sun.
“Bon, alors!” Didier approved, from his perch in the sand, halfway up a small stepladder.
She watched him shoot a few tests of the threesome at the table before handing his camera down to Marc to extract the Polaroids.
“Is good? Everything is good,petiteCecilia?”
“Everything is good, Didier.”
She liked him. He was fifty and French, with a head full of salt-and-pepper curls, twinkling eyes, and dimples. He had a raunchy sense of humor and expensive taste, and the fact that he was one of the most sought-after photographers in a world she’d longed to be a part of was just icing. But it was his joie de vivre that Cecilia found most infectious. His very French way of taking the time to appreciate a good meal or a good sunrise, emphasizing quality over quantity, and finding art and beauty in the tiniest of things was exhilarating.
“Look at the light here,” he said to her now, turning his head toward the sea. “C’est sublime, non?”
“Oui, c’est sublime.”
“The blue is blue and the white is white. There’s no particles in the air.C’est juste… parfait. Alors…”He smiled, taking the newly developed prints from Marc.
Cecilia watched as he scrutinized them, one eye squinting. Assessing composition, light, shadows. “Pas mal,” he said finally. “Show the Italians.”
The “Italians,” who included at least one Frenchy and a Spaniard, signed off on the test images but for the Pacífico beer bottles, and as Cecilia went to remove them from the table she startled unexpectedly. Anouk, the newcomer, had reached out and linked her forefinger around the two gold bangles on Cecilia’s wrist.
“Ils sont trop beaux, tes bracelets.”
Cecilia was thrown. She was not used to models touching her. Handing her random items, yes. A safety pin, a book. Once, a used tissue. On a few occasions, they’d used her shoulder for balance while readjusting a shoe. But nothing like this. This deliberate. This intimate.
Her eyes flew up to meet Anouk’s. They were intense: large, a dark, almost emerald, green, heavy lids. She was young, likely still in her teens, nary a laugh line or crow’s foot in sight. She had round high cheeks, and poreless skin, and long, caramel-brown hair that the stylist, Santiago, had coiffed into a mass of loose curls. “Beachy waves,” he would later call it. With her fresh face and coral-stained lips, she was altogether vibrant, magical. Apparently, the grunge movement was over.
“Merci,” Cecilia said. She could feel her cheeks flushing. She wasn’t certain if it was embarrassment or something else.
“Is your family from the Caribbean?” She’d asked it in French. Her voice deep, syrupy. She had one of those Gallic pouts. Her upper lip wider and more prominent than the lower. Cecilia attributed it to a slight overbite and a lifetime of impeccable pronunciation of words likepireandpoireandpur.
“Jamaica. Yes.”
Anouk smiled. “Martinique.”
